Tag Archives: repeat pattern

I’m jolly pleased with my horse dress; the result of my latest adventure in home sewing. It’s a variation of the first dress I ever made (a shift style sewn from my dragonfly fabric) and since I mastered the use of bias binding on that project I decided to make an external feature of it this time; embellishing it with contrasting stitching.

The horse motif was inspired by the extraordinarily beautiful hand painted artwork I saw when Carter’s Steam Fair visited Maldon in Essex.

I made a pencil drawing (left) using my photos for reference, taking a morbid turn by adding the skeleton of the horse as part of the decoration.

I vectorised the drawing in Illustrator, used Photoshop to colour it and make the repeat pattern, which I then had printed onto a light cotton by the lovely folk at Woven Monkey.

The dress feels lovely on, here’s me posing about in it on my 50th birthday.

I started off with a conventional pencil drawing, working from photos I had taken while visiting the fair in the summer.

Having scanned the drawing into Photoshop I coloured it. Nice but boring, I thought…and that stripy saddle looks a bit like a rib cage…

…so I kept drawing and developed the skeletal theme which I found much more interesting

I scanned the new pencil drawing into my computer, vectorised it in Illustrator, then coloured and duplicated it to make a repeating pattern in Photoshop. I also added noise to the image to improve the texture.

I like the way that it’s not until you look closely that you see the dark creepiness of this image.

I’m eagerly awaiting delivery of a sample of digitally printed fabric in this design….it’s been dispatched today….dead horse cushions, anyone?!